


Circles Round You

by DoubleNegative



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: (sort of), Adoption, Established Relationship, Father-Son Relationship, Future Fic, Kid Fic, M/M, baby things are cute and also CRAZY, names are complicated
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-26
Updated: 2017-07-26
Packaged: 2018-12-07 10:54:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11622078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoubleNegative/pseuds/DoubleNegative
Summary: Eric has a sudden vivid memory of his own childhood room, the one he had before they moved to Madison. Mama had decorated it, of course, but she’d done it with Coach in mind, with an eye toward the sort of father-son bonding that seemed to come naturally to all his cousins and classmates. There’d been a football-patterned wallpaper border and a gridiron rug that scratched under Eric’s bare feet when he got out of bed every morning. And every night he’d fallen asleep under a duvet printed with cartoon football players, running and making passes and tackling without fainting once. The night after his first disastrous peewee practice he’d pushed the comforter to the floor, not sure he could look at it without crying, and blamed the unseasonably warm night when Mama asked him about it the next morning.





	Circles Round You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [auntiesuze](https://archiveofourown.org/users/auntiesuze/gifts).



“Did you know that you can buy Falconers-branded _baby lotion_?” Eric asks, looking up from his tablet. “And _hairbrushes_.” It’s not the first time he’s idly browsed baby gear, but it’s the first time he’s done it with _purpose_. It’s leading him to strange places.

“Do most babies even have enough hair to brush?” Jack asks, without taking his eyes from the game tape he’s watching on his laptop.

“The personalized burp cloth seems like the kind of thing you oughta buy with a rival team’s logo,” Eric continues. “Blackhawks, maybe.” He snickers. “Or Aces.”

This time Jack does look up, head cocked to the side in confusion. “People actually buy special burp cloths? Couldn’t you just… use a washcloth?”

“Excuse me, Mr. Zimmermann, but a _washcloth_ will not ‘help your little one look like a real Providence Falconers supporter while keeping him mess-free.’” He almost manages to say it with a straight face, too.

Jack just blinks, shakes his head, and starts his video again. Eric leaves him to it; the Falcs are about to face the Caps for the first time since the Caps beat them in last year’s conference final and he knows Jack’s worried about it.

And, honestly, the burp cloths are pretty ridiculous.

So are the Falconers cloth diapers that he discovers on Etsy a few minutes later, but if they happen to find their way onto his secret baby-gear Pinterest board anyway, well--no one has to know.  


* * *

 

They agree that they should wait until closer to the baby’s due date to pick out baby things and decorate the nursery, so by the time they finally-- _finally_ \--go to the store to start browsing, Eric’s sure he’s going to go crazy over all the adorable possibilities. They both will, probably.

And Lord, but baby things are cute nowadays. Fewer sickly pastels and obnoxious primaries than he remembers from his own childhood, far more sophisticated palettes and modern designs. They’d already agreed cartoon characters, media tie-ins, and anything egregiously gendered were right out, but even so, there are more adorable mobiles and bassinets and crib bumpers than Eric knows what to do with.

He and Jack wander in different directions early on, and it’s a solid twenty minutes before Eric spots him again, testing a glider with an expression of deep concentration. Eric himself has gotten distracted from his original mission--crib sheets--by a display of hooded towels. Probably not a necessity, at least for the first few months, but they all seem to have _ears_ , and Eric is only human. He adds one with rabbit ears to his basket.

The first thing he sees when he finally makes his way to the bedding section is a toddler-sized quilt covered in a pattern of pucks and criss-crossing hockey sticks, displayed next to a pillow shaped like a trophy. It is, objectively, incredibly cute, and exactly what everyone who knows them would pick out on their behalf. After all, they _met_ playing hockey. It’s fair to say they wouldn’t be together, never mind adopting this baby, if not for pucks and hockey sticks and early-morning checking practice.

But… but.

It leaves Eric cold, somehow, and he can’t figure out why until he notices the football-printed blanket folded next to it, and has a sudden vivid memory of his own childhood room, the one he had before they moved to Madison. Mama had decorated it, of course, but she’d done it with Coach in mind, with an eye toward the sort of father-son bonding that seemed to come naturally to all his cousins and classmates. There’d been a football-patterned wallpaper border and a gridiron rug that scratched under Eric’s bare feet when he got out of bed every morning. And every night he’d fallen asleep under a duvet printed with cartoon football players, running and making passes and tackling without fainting _once_. The night after his first disastrous peewee practice he’d pushed the comforter to the floor, not sure he could look at it without crying, and blamed the unseasonably warm night when Mama asked him about it the next morning.

It’ll be different with their son, he’s sure as he can be of that, but of course nothing’s guaranteed, however good their intentions are. Hell, Jack would be the first to tell him that following in your father’s footsteps doesn’t necessarily make things any easier.

Still, it’s hard to imagine Jack spotting that hockey quilt and not loving it: while it’s true he does have other interests, it always does seem to circle back to hockey, for him. And that’s fine, of course it is; Eric has always admired Jack’s focus.

Anyway, it’s a quilt, not a parenting philosophy. Eric’s sure he’s overthinking this. He reaches out to smooth his hand over it, thinking. It’s well-made and flannel-soft, the plaid fabric of the border warm and inviting, like one of Jack’s button-downs after a few dozen washes. He can put his hang-ups aside and imagine wrapping their baby in it. It wouldn’t be so bad. No--he’d have a baby in his arms. _Their_ baby. It wouldn’t be bad at all.

He’s just about ready to put the quilt in his cart to show Jack when Jack himself appears with his arms wrapped around a packaged crib set.

“You must’ve read my mind; I was just gonna find you,” Eric says. “I figured you’d want to see these.” He gestures, a little awkwardly, at the quilt and pillow displayed behind him.

“Ha, nice,” Jack says. “That trophy pillow’s cute.” He’s less enthusiastic about it than Eric expected. Jack shifts around the bundle he’s holding so the picture on the front is showing. “I, uh. What do you think about this one, maybe?”

The quilt shows the solar system, from a red-nosed sun in one corner to a cheerfully-striped Neptune in another. The space between the planets is dotted with stars and smiling asteroids. The whole thing is, very possibly, the most adorable thing Eric has ever seen, in a store full of things specifically engineered to be as adorable as humanly possible. He tells Jack as much, in a voice at least half an octave higher than usual. He can’t help it. The power of cute compels him.

“There’s a matching pillow that’s shaped like an astronaut,” Jack offers.

Eric casts his eyes heavenward. “Lord give me strength.”

 

* * *

 

They buy the crib set. Of course they do. It’s so cute it hurts, for one thing, and for another, it makes Jack’s face light up in a way nothing else they’ve seen does does. It’s not as though Eric needed a reason to leave that hockey quilt behind, but Jack’s soft eyes when he places the astronaut pillow on the glider they picked out is all the persuasion Eric needs.

Lardo comes over and helps them stencil silver stars on the soft gray walls of the nursery, then sketches out designs for a mobile over chocolate cream pie and coffee.

“God, I can’t wait to be somebody’s crazy art aunt,” Lardo says, sitting back and tucking her pencil behind her ear. “Gather ‘round, kiddos, Auntie Lardo’s gonna teach you about the Guerrilla Girls.”

“How’s your finger-painting these days?” Eric asks, grinning.

“On fuckin’ point, dude. I am _ready_ for this.” She takes another long sip of her coffee. “What about you guys? Have you picked out a name for Bittlemann Junior yet?”

“Nothin’ ‘junior’, that’s for certain,” Eric says, and hopes it doesn’t come out too sharp. His mama had brought it up, early on when they’d found out Paloma was expecting a boy--how exciting it would be to have a third Eric Richard. Eric had to swallow hard against the visceral distaste that notion inspired, forcing out a “we’ll see” instead.

He didn’t mind it so much now, being “Junior,” but in high school it had been a constant reminder that their name was about the only thing he and Coach had in common. He was “Rick’s son” or “Coach’s boy” as often as he was “Eric,” back home. He’d known when he went to Samwell that it would give him the freedom to be out, at least some of the time, but he hadn’t anticipated the freedom that came with being Eric Bittle around people who never, ever associated that name with the Madison Bulldogs’ head football coach.

Much later, after Lardo’s left, after they’ve eaten dinner and cleaned up, after they’ve showered and brushed their teeth and climbed damp-skinned into bed, Jack turns toward Eric with the light from the bedside lamp throwing strange shadows on his face. “I’ve been thinking,” he begins slowly. “For awhile now, but Lardo sort of reminded me today. I--I think I want the baby to have your last name.”

For once Eric is too surprised to say anything, and Jack plows forward. “I mean, I know we briefly talked about hyphenating, but that’s just--it would be such a long name. I don’t even know if it would fit on forms. And I just--I think I would love it if he were a Bittle.”

Eric blinks hard against the tears that flood his eyes. “Oh my god, honey. Oh my--” He swallows hard. “I don’t know what to say. That’s--well.” He really doesn’t know what to say, but he’s not sure he has to say it anyway. Jack knows, or could probably imagine, how impossible it had once seemed to Eric that he might have his own child someday, let alone a child who wore his family name. As strongly as Eric feels about not naming their son after one of them, he’s a little surprised by how deeply the prospect of holding the next generation of the Bittle name resonates. But Jack--Jack deserves to feel that, too.

“What about you, though? Don’t you---I mean, don’t you want that? I guess I figured that’s why we’d hyphenate, y’know?”

Jack takes a deep breath. “I do, yeah. That’s why I thought… I might take your name too.”

Eric’s speechless for the second time in as many minutes. “Oh, _honey_ ,” he breathes, lovestruck and incredulous. Jack slips an arm around his shoulders and pulls him closer; Eric goes easily, pressing his face into Jack’s chest because _lord_ , he needs a minute.

Jack’s heartbeat thuds wildly against his cheek, but his breathing is calm, even. Eric tries to pace his to match it.

Eventually he feels collected enough to pull back so he can see Jack’s face again. “You’d really do that?” Eric whispers. “Don’t you… I mean, you’re--well, your name’s kinda famous.”

Jack snorts softly. “That’s not exactly a selling point for me, Bits.” Well, that’s fair, and maybe even something Eric would have realized himself, if he hadn’t spent so much time thinking about his own complicated relationship with his name. “Anyway,” Jack continues. “I’d probably stay Zimmermann professionally. But in my personal life? In our son’s life? On forms and to schools and doctors and everyone else? I’ve thought about it a lot, and I’d love to be Jack Bittle.”

Eric doesn’t actually burst into tears, but it’s a near thing. It isn’t even that this is a dream come true: it’s that it's never even occurred to him that he could dream of this. It’s so far out of what he’d always thought was possible, like winning a drawing he’d never entered.

Then again, that’s how a lot of his life has felt in the decade since he started at Samwell: his teammates, the Haus, Jack, the name Eric is slowly building for himself in the cooking world. And now: their son, their family. Their _name_.

It’s been years since the future’s felt anything but bright for Eric, but now it feels dazzling, glowing like the stars on the nursery walls.

**Author's Note:**

>  **One thousand thanks to:**  
>  -rosemoonweaver for the beta  
> -AuntieSuze for her generous Fandom Trumps Hate donation and for her infinite patience as I wrote so slowly I nearly went backwards (did go backwards, actually, for awhile there)  
> -the Antidiogenes Club for listening to me whine even more than usual, a feat  
> -The FTH team for organizing this whole shebang, and making sure something good came out of an absolute, ongoing shitfest. Your ideas are good and you should feel good.
> 
> **Other notes:**  
>  The Falconers baby gear mentioned is all based on [real things you can really buy](http://shop.nhl.com/Montreal_Canadiens_Kids_Accessories/Newborn_And_Infant_Montreal_Canadiens_Baby_Lotion_and_Soap_Gift_Set) in the official NHL store. Yes, even the baby lotion. 
> 
> The baby quilt they actually buy is [also real](https://www.landofnod.com/deep-space-baby-quilt/s497988), and so damn cute I'm in real physical pain every time I look at it. I want it in queen size, pls.
> 
> The title is from "Orbital" by Josh Ritter: _Who do you circle round? Who is it circles round you?_
> 
> come see me on tumblr: [one thousand hurrahs](http://www.onethousandhurrahs.tumblr.com)


End file.
